Police in Battle Creek, Michigan are saying that the stabbing of a man in that city could possibly be a hate crime. The hate crime classification comes after learning the man is gay and discovering a ranting post on Craigslist which seems to target the victim. The victim had his car stolen by the assailant and spent a week and a half in the hospital following the attack.
The Battle Creek Enquirer reports:
A witness told police he was nearby, heard screaming and, when he investigated, saw one man attacking another. When the witness told the attacker to stop, the man replied it was a domestic dispute and to leave. The suspect then fled, taking the victim's car.
Detective Sgt. Austin Simons, supervisor of the detective bureau, said Thursday that police are investigating an online posting which appeared the day after the attack on Craigslist, a classified advertisement website.
In the anonymous message, which has since been removed, the writer, using derogatory references to gays, alluded to the attack under the headline "I warned you, you dumb queer." The message continued about the meeting at the park and "I e-mailed and said I have something … but you did not think it was a knife did you. Now you are in the hospital and your car is in the river. I warned you."
If the author of the Craigslist post was indeed the assailant, this sounds like it could have been yet another terrible Internet meeting. Police are still searching for the victim's car, a copper-colored Toyota Matrix. The assailant (apparently a stocky white man with bald or shaved head and wearing a black shirt) is still at large.
Watch a local news clip of the incident, AFTER THE JUMP.
